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3.5 

A Princess of Mars

By Edgar Rice Burroughs & Junot Díaz
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs & Junot Díaz digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Rediscover the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance—now featuring an introduction by Junot Díaz
 
In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth—a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars’s weak gravity possesses the agility of a superman. He also wins the heart of fellow-prisoner Dejah Thoris, the alluring, red-skinned Princess of Helium, whose people he swears to defend against their grasping and ancient enemy, the city-state of Zodanga.
 
John Carter first appeared in 1912 in the pages of The All-Story magazine and immediately entered the dream-life of American readers young and old. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s favorite among his many creations and remains a favorite of lovers of science fiction and fantasy everywhere.

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3 Reviews

3.5
“Overall, I liked the story. The science made me laugh, but it was based on science from a hundred years ago so I give him kudos for at least considering the science of the time. It had too much of a great white savior feel to me to rate it very high, and it was definitely very sexist. He seemed more concerned about the loss of good fighting men than the loss of an entire city filled with women and children. The world-building was good and consistent. Woola, the Martian "dog", was a special favorite of mine. I can recommend this book only as a groundbreaker that established a number of sci-fi tropes that we still see today. I find myself wondering if the war between Martian races in the Martian Manhunter series and the other Martian races was influenced by the various Martian races found on Barsoom. I would warn any potential readers about the racism and sexism in the book that is undoubtedly to some degree a reflection of the time in which it was written. At least it is my hope that we have made significant progress since then.”

About Edgar Rice Burroughs

Junot Díaz’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His highly-anticipated first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was greeted with rapturous reviews, including Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times calling it “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” His debut story collection, Drown, published eleven years prior to Oscar Wao, was also met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz lives in New York City and is a professor of creative writing at MIT.

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